Posted
by
ScuttleMonkeyon Thursday July 31, 2008 @06:02PM
from the hand-that-rocks-the-tectonic-plates dept.

Kotaku has a host of screenshot images from the new upcoming Wii sim, SimCity Creator. Looks like the new SimCity allows you to not only build and manage a city, but utilize a whole new range of disaster tools as well. Can't wait to introduce my citizens to the new hand of God.

Its a mix between somewhat simple and somewhat complex. I loved the original, loved Simcity 2000, and enjoyed Simcity 3000, but Simcity 4 included so much depth and micromanagement that it turned away a lot of us.

Actually, if you want the real black sheep of that series, try Sim City Societies, a.k.a., Sim City V. It was kinda the opposite: over-simplified to the point of being absurd and meaningless.

It wasn't just a numbers game, it was a _totals_ game. You needed X points creativity to place one artsy-town house. That's ok, you just need to place Y graffiti walls for those, but it doesn't actually matter where. It can be in a bunker under the ocean floor, for all those people care. Ditto for just about anything else. You need X1 police-state points for a secret police HQ, if you go for oppressive totalitarian town. You need X2 wealth points to build a bank.

The whole thing is just a game of producers and consumers, and the only condition is that you must produce more than you consume. But even there the relationships are actually weird. A secret police HQ for example, actually consumes police state points, so logically it makes your city less oppressive. A bank actually consumes wealth points, so logically it would make your town poorer. Etc.

Worse yet, because the game actually encourages you to stick with one theme, you'll likely need to manage _one_ number. Yay.

Ok, there is one more number: workers vs work-places. Even that's screwed up. Shops don't actually have employees. Buildings are divided hard into:

- houses: they provide workers

- service buildings, like shops: they neither add nor use workers, but they satisfy some need

- industry: they provide employment, but otherwise have no influence on morale

The division is weird at times. E.g., banks are industry: they provide employment, but otherwise are of no use to your citizens. It gets worse: there are even kinds of _shops_ which are categorized as industry, so they don't actually sell anything. And viceversa.

Things like education quotient, happiness factors, pollution, etc, are gone too. E.g., placing a school doesn't really do anything for your city's education, it just makes kids happy (I'm guessing the designer doesn't have kids of school age;), provides some kinds of points, and subtracts other kinds of points. So basically it's again at most needed for the totals to build something else. Ditto for, say, slum or police state themes. They don't actually make the citizens unhappier or anything, they just provide or consume some points.

In a nutshell, it's no longer a city simulator, it's a fancy drawing program with some elementary maths attached. It lets you paint a city in a certain theme, but not much more, and not in a much more interesting way than doing it in Gimp. (In fact, maybe less. Wrestling Gimp's interface can be a challenge and game by itself;)

So to cut this rant short(er) and get to the actual point: well, I see your point about too _much_ depth and micro-management. But I hope the next one will have at least _some_ depth and complexity. Something as shallow as a puddle on the sidewalk, can be even less fun to play.

A bank actually consumes wealth points, so logically it would make your town poorer.

I thought most banks offer loans to people for money they will have a hard time repaying at a high enough interest rate that the likelihood of them ever paying off the debt become negligible. Isn't that consuming wealth and making the town poorer?

And on the other side of the coin, there are those of us for whom even SimCity 4 wasn't complex enough. Or, at least, realistic enough.

I, for example, would like to see a SimCity that wasn't based on a rectangular grid, so that you could have proper curves in the roads. I'd also like to see the ability to make walking and/or cycling paths, so that you could potentially create a city with no cars whatsoever. Bus stops and subway stations that didn't take up a whole grid square would be nice, as would being able to build roads one lane at a time (including turn lanes). Finally, I'd like to see mixed-use zoning.

Of course, they could keep the complexity down by removing other stuff. I wouldn't mind them cutting the touchy-feely "my sims" junk, the driving missions (if somebody wants that, they ought to just make a new Streets of SimCity and do it properly instead), etc.

You've already been modded as high as possible, so I might as well put in my two cents instead.:)

I agree wholeheartedly. Building a city is absolutely fascinating, and SimCity gives a taste while making more interesting layouts and experiments impossible. I'd love to have a city simulator that let me *at least* emulate a real-world city with angled and curved roads, pedestrian paths and walkways, customizable roads (with respect to number of lanes and lane use), mixed-use zoning (or even un-zoned development), better overpasses, etc.

I can imagine such a game being similar, complexity-wise, to SimCity 4 at first sight, but including tools like a Road Designer, an Intersection Designer, a Zone Designer, and so on that let you produce custom elements for the game. I'd pay a good deal of money for something like this.

Here's what I don't care about. I don't care about the tedium of laying pipes and power lines everywhere. I don't care to have special sims I follow around the city. I don't even care about natural disasters, though I suppose some people enjoy disaster scenarios. I just want a really sophisticated sandbox to play in.:)

What about build times? In real life it can be pretty problematic to expand a high traffic road for more capacity because the construction site will leave the road at lower capacity for months or years. Stuff wearing out and choosing whether and when to put up a construction site to repair it, managing the results of eminent domain use when you realize the low density residential area in the center of your town would be a better spot for expanding your commercial zones, old towns and marks of interest that

Or union strikes, shortage of materials, global warming, mass murder, plagues, being elected or losing office, recession, bribes, etc. The Sim City games are just too nice. Its a little city fantasy without any of the negative, but realistic, aspects except a natural disaster.

Well, stuff like plagues and mass murder are pretty much rare desasters, global warming isn't acting on the timeframes present in SimCity (probably a policy point but since air pollution is already handled by the game that's probably enough). Economic stuff would make sense in the game though, especially this whole business about attracting large factories and whatnot into the city with tax breaks which seems to be a common event in real life.

I wish there were more games for the Wii like this - the WiiMote seems tailor made for turn based strategy and board games.

I'm trying to grok what you've written, but it just won't compile. SimCity is a real-time strategy game, not turn-based. And how is the Wiimote tailor-made for TBS or board games? Seems to me it's tailor-made for action games, but maybe that's just me and all the games that have already come out for it.

Seriously, I'm really curious, what advantages do you feel the Wiimote has over

Only if it starts getting too hectic... I don't believe it's in any way "cheating," either, because you could easily pass a zoning bill that marks dozens of areas as a certain type in a single 1 hour town meeting... but in Sim time it could takes weeks or months, depending on how fast the game is running.

I'm getting encouraged to install SimCity 3000 (the latest I have) and play, if it just didn't suck away so much time...

As a funny anecdote, when I was in college I had the original. My roommate asked if h

I have a feeling it's because they know the Wii changed the rules of what games qare successful but they don't know into what, they're waiting for someone else to make more successful games they can clone (after cloning the "casual" games failed due to copying incorrectly).

Really? Because all the commercials I've seen for it lack any mention/logos for the Wii (though they have a DS one), Google seems to think it was put "on hold" indefinitely, Amazon has an Xbox 360, PS3, and DS version for sale but no Wii version (available, pre-order, or sold out). I'd *love* to see this on the Wii, but near as I can tell, it doesn't exist in this universe...

Check out the "Network Addon Mod"
http://www.simtropolis.com/modding/index.cfm?p=details&id=380 [simtropolis.com]
It extends the transportation as much as possible through creative tiles, and even tweaks some of the parameters in the route finding algorithms. HIGHLY recommended. Granted, some of the new tiles are annoying to use (especially the piece wise ones you can't drag and must place tile by tile). But you can actually now place El trains over roads, and other such odd omissions from the original sim city.

The Rush Hour expansion pack added a bunch of good stuff, but didn't go far enough in my opinion... Dealing with traffic in SimCity has always been the most interesting part of the game to me, it's the only part where you have to really plan things out. Some road options were very limited, and some public transportation elements hardly ever got used even when they seem like they should've been...

Yeah, I'd love SimRoad! It's too bad that all these sim games are going towards simplicity instead of more depth.

After EA made the decision to let Tilted Mill create SimCity Societies, many fans figured the series would just die. EA wanted the SimCity series to go towards a different direction, with less micromanagement and more, as they call it, "social engineering simulation."

To be fair to Tilted Mill, their developers did pay a lot of attention to the forums and try to accommodate fans, but they were headed in the opposite direction under the guidance of EA.

The SimCopter demo only let you play for 20 minutes, and didn't let you load your own cities, but I discovered that the cities it did load were hard-coded, so you could just replace one with one of your own sc2k saves and fly around it. I spent ten minutes trying to fly to the top of an arcology (didn't make it - there's probably a flight ceiling lower than the archology top), but the game was great fun.

I'm not saying it's a bad game or anything, but when the most exciting thing about a new SimCity game is the disasters you can inflict upon your city, it sort of implies that they've made the wrong kind of game.The objective of the game is to build and manage your city, not destroy it (although that's always fun), makes me think it's about time SimCity got a proper remake to bring it into the 21st century and not just updated graphics.

It's sad that SimCity for the Wii looks much better and more complex than SimCity Societies (the latest PC game in the SimCity series, notable for 1. Being a complete abortion of a game and 2. NOT being developed by Maxis).

I've always thought that the Wiimote would be natural for a SimCity game. I do wonder how it will handle really large cities, though. Lots of buildings to render and things like traffic routing to calculate.

It's hard to tell from the screen shots, but it looks rather flat to me. I wonder if they left out terrain/grading entirely?

It sure would make things simpler, but it also detracts from the realism a bit. I wouldn't mind, though, one of the first things I usually did when starting a city from scratch on my own was to flatten the land out. That is, unless I was going for a certain overall effect.

Personally I found that with a bit of creativity and patience, I found that you place a large mountain in one corner and fill it with waterfalls and hydro dams to fulfill your power needs.

Aditionally, though I doubt it has an actual effect on anything, I liked having industry on one side of a small ridge, a small bit of light commercial zones on top of the ridge and then a nice mix of commercial and residential zones on the other side of the ridge. Again, I doubt it had an effect on the game, but it was kin